Many companies have invested in a variety of monitoring equipment to gain visibility into network and/or application usage, and to adhere to government stipulated compliance requirements. This monitoring equipment is generally passive and monitors traffic received on a particular port. This approach to monitoring does not work well in today's environment. One reason for this is that applications, which in the past typically limited their traffic to a particular port, no longer do so and, instead, use various ports. Another reason for this is that particular ports, which in the past typically were dedicated to traffic of particular applications, now receive traffic of various applications.